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THE HORN of the UNICORN by Professor Humphrey Humphreys, O.B.E., M.C., M.B., F.D.S.R.C.S

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THE HORN of the UNICORN by Professor Humphrey Humphreys, O.B.E., M.C., M.B., F.D.S.R.C.S THE HORN OF THE UNICORN by Professor Humphrey Humphreys, O.B.E., M.C., M.B., F.D.S.R.C.S. Vice Dean, Faculty of Dental Surgery, Royal College of Surgeons of England THE HORN OF the unicorn as it appeared in medieval. art and legend is of particular interest to doctors and dentists: to the former because its substance formerly figured as a drug in the British Pharmacopoeia, to the latter because it was in fact a tooth, the tusk of the narwhal. Though everyone now agrees that the unicorn never existed, this unanimity is quite recent. All through the 19th century there were periodic reports of its presence in darkest Africa or on the Asiatic steppes, and hopes that it would turn out to be a reality died hard. But if there never was such a creature why did the men of the middle ages believe in it so firmly and depict it so often ? As Christians it was incumbent on them to do so, for it was mentioned in the Old Testament and, therefore, must be real. Its presence there was due to the authors of the Septuagint, the Hellenised Jews who, at Alexandria, in the centuries between the city's foundation and the Christian era, translated their sacred books from Hebrew into Greek and on seven occasions used the word piovoKEpcos (Greek for unicorn). The Hebrew original was re'em or oxen, but the context shows that a wild ox was intended, for the reference is always to an animal strong and untamable, as for example in Job xxxix, 10. " Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great ? " Why did the translators --the legendary 70-employ the word PovOKEpcS ? There were at least two sources from which they may have derived their belief in a wild bull with but a single horn, and there may have been others in the shape of folklore now forgotten. In the first place the Greek naturalists, Aristotle and others, had put on record the reputed reality of the unicorn, though none claimed to have seen one. The earliest reference is by Ctesias, a Greek physician at the Persian court at the end of the 5th century B.C., who wrote that such animals existed in India, and it appears highly probable that he had heard of the Indian rhinoceros which-unlike the African variety and the extinct species figured in paleolithic art-has only a single horn. The strength, solitary habits and ferocity which are said to be the most striking qualities of the unicorn support this conjecture, though Ctesias' description reminds us in some respects of the onager or wild ass. The theory is further favoured by the fact that S. Jerome, when writing his Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, used rhino- ceros as equivalent to pov6KEpCS : he had probably seen one in the Rome arena. But there was a second source from which the Septuagint scholars may have derived their belief. Assyrian and Persian art employed a convention which regulated the representation of animals in profile on flat surfaces. In such profiles an animal like an ox commonly appeared with one horn thereby solving for the artist the problem of perspective, 377 HUMPHREY HUMPHREYS and it is possible that alien peoples, like the Jews in captivity, without proper understanding of an unfamiliar convention, may have been led in this way to believe in unicorns. The great single-horned bulls upon which they gazed at Nineveh or Babylon probably represented the gigantic aurochs or wild ox (Fig. 1). That was the opinion of Layard, who excavated them a century ago. This animal, extinct since the 16th century but once widespread over Europe and the Near East, stood nearly seven feet high, and Cesar's description (on de bell/ gallico) of its strength and ferocity accords well with the biblical attribution of these qualities to the unicorn. Fig. 1. Sculptured ornament on robe on Assur-Nasir-Pal II, King of Assyria 850 B.C. From A. H. Layard's " Monuments of Nineveh," I, plate 48, Fig. 2. There is no convincing evidence that the Assyrian sculptors themselves believed in it. Indeed in the art of the ancient east there is none of that surprising unanimity on the shape of the unicorn's horn which we find in Christian illustrations. A bull, an antelope or a goat seem at different times to have supplied the model and this perhaps shows that the artists were not thinking in terms of a specific single-horned animal. But there is one feature of their art which is a source of perennial speculation. For 3,000 years from the Royal Tomb at Ur to the palace at Persepolis erected by Artaxerses in 350 B.C. the art motif of a lion attacking an ungulate represented with a single horn-the lion and the unicorn fighting-recurs so constantly that many scholars have sought for the symbolic meaning which, as our knowledge of ancient art compels us to believe,underlay it. The most plausible hypothesis is that it personified 378 THE HORN OF THE UNICORN the victory of a sun-worshipping patriarchal people over an older moon- worshipping matriarchal society, a struggle reflected in the myths of many nations. The early history of Egypt and Chaldea, Greek myth and modern anthropology, all indicate that the patriarchal social pattern displaced one in which descent, property and power passed in the female line. The coincidental duration of the lunar and feminine cycles suggested that the one governed the other so that the moon became pre-eminently the planet presiding over women. Now an association of the unicorn with the moon is attested by both ancient and mediaeval art, and from very early times the lion has served as a solar emblem. Another theory is that the allusion was astronomical, representing the triumph of summer (for the summer solstice then lay in Leo) over spring represented by Taurus, the zodiacal sign of the sun at the vernal equinox (Bunt Anti- quity: December, 1930). Some faint echo of this ancient feud lingered on even after the dawn of the Christian era. The theme recurs occa- sionally in Byzantine art and its derivatives, and appears in mediwval bestiaries so that Spenser alludes to it in the Faerie Queene Like as the lyon, whose imperial powre A proud rebellious unicorn defyes, T'avoide the rash assault and wrathful stowre Of his fiers foe, him to a tree applies. And when him running in full course he spyes He slips aside; the whiles that furious beast His precious home, sought of his enimyes, Strikes in the stroke, ne thence can be released, But to the Victor yields a bounteous feast. This is an exact description at an interval of 2,400 years and nearly 3,000 miles of the scene depicted in Fig. 1. The tenacity of life of this legend need not surprise us when we recall that a belief in the power of the moon to influence the flow of the body's humours was held by serious physicians as late as the 19th century. Let us now come to Europe in the Christian era. The art of the Middle Ages reveals the unicorn as one of its favourite subjects, and the reason for this-even more surprising than the fact-is that the animal had now become one of the symbolic representations of Jesus Christ. We can trace this belief back to the third century A.D., when there was compiled at Alexandria a collection of animal stories known as Physio- logus or " The naturalist." They were fables, usually adorned with a moral and some reference to a passage in scripture, and in the course of time they attained such immense popularity that they were translated into practically every written language of Europe and the Near East from Iceland to Ethiopia. Some were perhaps old folk stories; others were probably invented at the time, for the human fancy has ever delighted in such tales and been prolific in their creation, from Esop's fables and the Buddhist Jataka to " Alice in Wonderland " and " The Wind in the Willows." In Physiologus appeared the tale by virtue of which the unicorn, already made authentic by the Septuagint, really came into his 379 HUMPHREY HUMPHREYS own. He is depicted therein as a small animal the size of a goat-very different from the personification of power figured in the Old Testament- but like him, wild and untamable, proud and solitary. However, there is one method by which he may be taken. If a virgin is set in his path he will run towards her, lay his head in her lap and sink into a repose wherein he can be slain by the hunter. This picture is a parable in which the Virgin is Mary and the unicorn Jesus; his rest in her lap might repre- sent the Incarnation, and his death at the hand of the hunter the Passion, though sometimes the hunter is represented as the Holy Ghost. It had an immense vogue for a thousand years, in the course of which the unicorn acquired other mystical attributes. In Gothic sculpture and stained glass, in painting and tapestry, in illuminated manuscripts and in heraldry, he is a favourite figure from the 12th century onwards. (Fig. 2.) Nor was the obvious erotic potential of the tale neglected in the literature of chivalry. There is some variety in his pictured appearance, perhaps encouraged by the conflicting accounts of Aristotle, Aelian and Pliny; sometimes his hoof is cloven, sometimes solid; here he resembles a goat, there a horse.
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